Procedure studied that could control blood pressure without medicine

BLOOMINGTON — High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a condition in which the force of the blood against artery walls is high enough that it could cause health problems. The more blood that is pumped and the narrower the arteries, the higher the blood pressure.

High blood pressure can lead to life-threatening complications, including stroke and heart attack, said Dr. Nilesh Goswami, interventional cardiologist with Prairie Cardiovascular Consultants in Springfield.

“This is a very prevalent problem in the United States,” Goswami said. About 30 percent of Americans have high blood pressure and about 10 percent have resistant hypertension, meaning they have high blood pressure that isn’t controlled with medicine.

For those people, any type of nonmedicine treatment could prove valuable.

But non-medicine treatment could be valuable even to people whose high blood pressure may be controlled with multiple medicines because some people don’t take their medicine all the time.

“Medicine compliance is an issue,” Goswami said. Not everyone with high blood pressure is willing to take several medicines a day for the rest of their lives.

The kidney is one organ that regulates blood pressure. Renal nerves communicate information back and forth between the kidney and the brain. In people with hypertension, renal nerves are hyperactive, which raises blood pressure.

The renal denervation procedure being studied in the Symplicity HTN-3 trial attempts to deactivate hyperactive